Yet while every major candidate in the Democratic Primary has acknowledged this truth, none of them have waged a campaign that would produce a mandate powerful enough to fix it. They all offer a take-out menu of bold ideas — from climate change legislation to tackling Wall Street, from student debt relief to equalizing the wealth in America — but not one has offered a plan for fundamental reform that could actually unite a divided America, and give us back a democracy that might work

perhaps... beyond presidency... beyond america...

Yet what should be obvious to everyone — or at least the 82% of Americans who believe “the system is rigged” — is that none of these incredible reforms is possible until we un-rig the rigged system first. We’ve lived through “change you can believe in.” What we need now is a reason to believe in change.

or... time for a new system... ie... no pres.. no 4yr elections ness...

We are better than this. And if we muster the strength to undo the corruption that the politicians have allowed, the greatness of America will be reflected in its government too. It once was. When we are finally equal citizens, it will again.

was a revelatory moment in which the media’s sense of itself became crystal-clear: they are the superego of our politics, whose charge is to police the Monsters From The Id that shadow its environs — with no id quite so monstrous as Trump’s. It is a view of politics as acting out, as the expression of infantile emotions, and of journalism as therap

The state engineered by progressive Republicans such as Theodore Roosevelt and New Deal Democrats such as his cousin, Franklin, was not a compromise with history to be carefully managed: it was an abomination to be destroyed. It did not represent a prudent adjustment to the new realities of industrial capitalism, urbanization, and aspirational democracy; it constituted a secular-minded reversal of a traditional order anchored in divinely decreed hierarchy.

Today’s Republican electorate — mostly white and male, and clustered in the small towns of the Midwest and, especially, the South — is the electorate you get when this is the message you preach for half a century. It consists of the ever diminishing numbers of people who continue to find it compelling. But however implausible it may seem to the rest of us, this dark vision of modernity as essentially a kind of heresy is the source of the Tea Party’s rage. It has an idea of what the world should look like, and it is shocked and horrified by the distance of that idea from the reality it detects all around it.

Central to that idea is the concept of dispossession. As I have argued before, the deeply Protestant roots of Southern revanchism posit a world in which rightful authority belongs to white heterosexual males who have, through fortitude and invention, wrested wealth from the detritus of a fallen world. The men of the Tea Party experience modern life as one continuous assault on this birthright. It began with the hated Lincoln’s defeat of the Slave Power, which toppled the racial order of the Old South; today’s hysteria over “illegals”— not to be confused with a rational concern for border security— simply sublimates this most primal of racial insults. Then came socialist-inspired efforts to level wealth and to distribute its hard-won gains to the undeserving and unproductive; then the agitations of “feminism” to remove women from their rightful place in a domestic sphere presided over by men

It began with the hated Lincoln’s defeat of the Slave Power, which toppled the racial order of the Old South; today’s hysteria over “illegals”— not to be confused with a rational concern for border security—

whoa..

slide that in..

This horror. They were found dead in the hull, asphyxiation due to overcrowding. Btw, they're refugees not migrants.https://t.co/hIY2OyHIv7

e report sets out 17 hugely ambitious goals for sustainable development, including the following: ending poverty, hunger, ensuring well-being for all at all ages, ensuring inclu- sive and equitable quality education, gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls, promoting inclusive economic growth, decent work, reducing inequality within and among countries and so on.

can't find tweet now.. bt tweeted by Sonia livingstone

while young people have been involved in the process of drafting the document, they are simultaneously understood as ‘potential’, in need of skills training so they can find employment – ‘no society can reach its full poten- tial if whole segments of that society, especially young people, are excluded from partici- pating in, contributing to and benefitting from development’ (p. 17)

it seems timely to remind ourselves what the term ‘adolescent’ means. ‘Adolescence’ derives from Latin and translates as ‘becoming adult’. As British social anthropologist Ronnie Frankenberg famously remarked on numerous occasions, we can only justify calling young people 'adolescents' if we describe our adult selves as ‘mortescent’ – we are all ‘unfinished’ and in a state of ‘becoming’ (see Bendelow, 2003). It is a social construction – as G. Stanley Hall discovered it in the United States in the early 20th Century, in his (in)famously titled book Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, so now a century later, it is being ‘discovered’ all over the world. It is a period of the lifecycle that becomes problematic as compulsory schooling is extended over a pro- tracted period, which inevitably delays the attainment of adult status (see also Koffman, 2014). To this extent, can the MDGs be said to have created global ‘adolescence’? The definition of ‘adolescent’ clearly also depends on what is meant by adulthood.

As Montgomery (2009) points outs most, if not all, cultures have ways of marking the end of childhood and the onset of adulthood in some manner, often marked by rites of passage. However, it is only in the industrialised world that this stage of the lifecycle has been conceptualised as a state worthy of medical/psychiatric attention, a pathological condition of mythic propor- tions in the adult imaginary. We need to remind ourselves that ‘adolescence’, at the time of its initial construction and moving forward, incorporated gender, race and class con- notations and implications. Especially in relation to gender, the ‘adolescent boy’ needed to be both managed and contained as well as allowed to be ‘wild’, while the adolescent girl was to be trained and domesticated. Adolescence was, and continues to be, deployed in perhaps predictable ways for working class children and children of colour.

whoa. much unpacking here.

It is arguably a social construction, brought about by the difficult question of how to manage the period in people’s lives when they are no longer at school, but needing to enter a new world, that of work. Like other constructions, adolescence takes on particular hues at particular moments in time, and 2015 is a particular critical moment for the concept. However, as Leena Alanen (2015) reminded us in her editorial, and other childhood sociologists and anthropologists have emphasised in the past (Sharon Stephens, 1995), there are limits to social constructionism. Social constructions ‘can be used to facilitate evidence-free assertions’. Biology clearly plays a part in and, to an extent, determines what happens to people throughout their lives, and bodies do unarguably change during the period after puberty. Sociobiologists and some neuro- scientists argue that biology determines that ‘adolescence’ is a particularly difficult period of storm and stress. However, biology and physical development (and indeed storms and stresses) affect us at all stages of the life course, not just in childhood, as Ronnie Frankenberg’s notion of ‘mortescent’ reminds us. It is the intersection of cul- ture and biology that shapes how childhood, youth (or any stage of the life course) are experienced and understood.

oh my.

total relation to school.. even in beginnings then.. ie.. detox from school to real life.

danger outcry..that happening earlier.. but obvious with unnatural tensions from both ends.. ie:school and work

Perhaps one of the most puzzling questions to me is how a concept like ‘adolescence’ links with ideas about ‘empowerment’ (at the current moment, always applied to girls), prevailingly expressed in UN documents. Can the two terms be reconciled? Adolescence is a disempowering term – it says to young people that they are ‘not yet’ adult; they are deficient, becoming, lacking, ‘too young’ and so on. It also enables normative ideas to be loaded onto young people in terms of what they should or should not be doing in terms of behaviour. To talk about ‘empowering adolescents’ sounds like a contradiction in terms.

thinking of Laurie here

add to adolesc age

Many aspects of children’s lives discussed in the pages of the journal reflect aspects of the Great Derangement – the papers we publish on topics like migration, refugees, asy- lum-seeking children, children who are rendered vulnerable by sets of circumstances outside their control, for whom borders have no relevance. Children have been living through and experiencing this derangement and seem likely to continue to do so. (At the time of writing, June 2015, the catastrophic loss of lives of migrants, including children, in the Mediterranean sea, and the displacement of vast numbers of people in the Middle East and Africa, bear witness to this.

It will take more than measurement to re-arrange the derangement, and in the meantime, we should be cautious about the categories we seek to impose.

indeed. would love to share

so many assumptions in article though... that perpetuate this last sentence..

deray mckesson (@deray)8/16/15 6:44 AMAnd I loved seeing the friendship b/t NWA, with all of its ups and downs. They depicted friendship well.

During 2014, American K-12 schools will spend an estimated $9.94 billion on educational technology, an increase of 2.5 percent over last year, according to Joseph Morris, director of market intelligence at the Center for Digital Education. On average, he said, schools spend about a third of their technology budgets on computer hardware

lovely. as children in poverty rises.

hello.

Meanwhile, the cost of equipment is going down, software is improving, and state policies are driving expectations for technology access. “It’s really exciting,” said Douglas Levin, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, “but at the same time it’s really challenging for schools to have confidence when they make a decision.”

wrong excitement... prices down.

wrong decisions... what to buy next.

oh my.

.@raisecain And I didn't tell u about new NetIndiv project; 2 issues of ABS on soc nets in E Asia; 2 other issues on Networked Work/Research

hello.

you blog holds my latest finds/thoughts/ramblings. not intended for normal edu-blogger consumption or modeling.lookdirectly below for our collection of more orderly-random (chaordic) thinking... if you are so inclined...